TFoB, Cursed Characters, In Archaeology: Mummy Parts & Cat Origins

From My Fantasy Writing Desk:

Tucson Festival of Books

I’ll be at TUCSON FESTIVAL OF BOOKS this Sunday, March 3. If you’re attending this giant readers’ paradise, come find me and say hello. I’ll have both my books for sale. My signing schedule:

Tucson Sisters in Crime Booth #428
Sun, Mar 3, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Indie Author Pavilion – Young Adults
Sun, Mar 3, 12:15 pm – 2:15 pm

For the Festival schedule, including hundreds of author panels and exhibitors, go to the TFoB website.

Cursing my character

The job of a fiction writer is to make terrible things happen to her characters and then watch the characters overcome and grow. I’ve been working on a fantastical disaster for one of my main characters–a curse. You would think it would be easier being able to “make stuff up” as fantasy elements demand. It’s not.

I’ve been wrestling with how to build this character development in a way that feels completely real and that is also clear. None of my readers, after all, have ever been overtaken by a magical curse. I can’t borrow on pre-existing experience–but that is what I have to do, find the commonalities with reality. There are ideas about my characters and their relationships that I’m developing with this curse–those have to come through persuasively. And threading something like this into a novel can get overdone, repetitive. So many challenges to building a persuasive character crisis.

You can see in the photos, my story board has taken flight. I use post-its on a large board to track my scenes, the different point of view characters and the elements of the plot. When I’m working on a thread like this curse, how it grows and reveals, how different characters are affected by it and perceive it, I lay out distinctive post-its on my board on top of the scene post-its. A writer friend who knows I do this gave me multi-colored butterfly post-its. Do you like the irony of a curse marked on my board with butterflies?

Archaeology I Enjoyed:

Mummy Parts Intercepted

“Mummy body parts discovered in passenger’s luggage at Cairo airport” Not the headline you read every day. Some villain broke down these parts into fairly small pieces to fit into their hiding place, what the article calls an earphone, but which from the photo, must be a speaker or some such—translation challenge there, I believe.

Why someone wanted to smuggle mummy fragments eludes me, but there must be some nefarious motivation, financial or otherwise. Anyone want to guess? What was the smuggler going to do with these mummy parts once arrived in Belgium? Best story gets a prize.

Click here for Archaeology News Network, “Mummy body parts discovered in passenger’s luggage at Cairo airport”

Where do Cats Come From?

For all the lovers of cats out there, here’s a post “Where do cats come from?” that really answers the question by archaeology and genetics. The semi-quick takeaway, very early on—Neolithic—in the Levant area and spreading out, cats came to live near humans for the rodents humans attracted. Resident, mutually beneficial pest control. These Neolithic humans even took cats to the island of Cyprus with them (no native feline species there, so we know they were brought), and we find a cat skeleton buried near its human.

Considerably later, a big infusion of kitty shows a genetic trail from Egypt. The cats in Egypt got to live the lazy life and this facilitated the development of a “more tolerant cat disposition” (really?) and it was this sort of cat that the Romans spread around. Apparently, this was originally to provide helpful cats on board ships so the rats didn’t destroy sailors’ food, ropes, etc.

So your cat probably has Egyptian genes somewhere in its makeup, but maybe you have an ancient, less amiable sort with a more direct line to those original Levantine Neolithic cats. This is a gross over-simplification, but the details are in the post. How many of you have cushy, Egyptian cats and how many pragmatic, Neolithic cats who insist on independence?

Click here for the ASOR blog, “Where do cats come from?”